That Berchem had been to Italy is pretty certain, and though no authentic account of his visit is recorded, there is a story that when Jacob Ruisdael went to Rome as a young man, Nicholas Berchem was the first acquaintance he met, and that their friendship was of long standing. Their frequent walks round about Rome gave them the opportunity of working together from Nature, and one day a cardinal seeing them at work, inquired what they were doing. His eminence was agreeably impressed with their drawings, and invited them to visit him in Rome. The painters returned to their work, where they met with a second _rencontre_ of a very different nature; a gang of thieves robbed and stripped them of their clothes. They returned in their shirts to the city, and called on the cardinal, who took pity upon them, ordered them clothes, and afterwards employed them in several considerable works in his palace. Berchem at one time took up his abode in the Castle of Bentheim, and as both he and Ruisdael have left several pictures of this castle it may be inferred that they worked there together, as at Rome. Apart from personal friendship there is nothing to connect Berchem with Ruisdael, the popularity of the former being derived from qualities of a totally different nature from those which raise Ruisdael far above any of his contemporaries as a landscape painter. JAN VAN HUYSUM was born at Amsterdam in 1682. His father, Justus Van Huysum, who dealt in pictures, was himself a middling painter in most kinds of painting. He taught his son to paint screens, figures and vases on wood, landscape, and sometimes flowers; but the son being arrived at a reasoning age perceived that to work in every branch of his art was the way to excel in none, therefore he confined himself to flowers, fruit, and landscape, and quitting his father's school set up for himself. No one before Van Huysum attained so perfect a manner of representing the beauty of flowers and the down and bloom of fruit; for he painted with greater freedom than Velvet Breughel and Mignon, with more tenderness and nature than Mario di Fiori, Andrea Belvedere, Michel de Campidoglio or Daniel Seghers; with more mellowness than de Heem, and with more vigour of colouring than Baptist Monoyer. His pictures of flowers and fruit pleasing an English gentleman, he introduced them into his own country, where they came into vogue and yielded a high price. To express the motions of the smallest insects with justice he used to contemplate them through the microscope with great attention. At the times of the year when the flowers were in bloom, and the fruit in perfection, he used to design them in his own garden, and the Sieur Gulet and Voorhelm sent him the most beautiful productions in those kinds they could pick up.